The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

By Amia Srinivasan

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its fundamental and sometimes clashing principles, The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing: Srinivasan is daring, compassionate, and in relentless search of a new frame.”
—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion

Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374721039

Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on and teaches political philosophy, feminist theory and epistemology. She is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Her essays and criticism—on animals, incels, death, the university, technology, political anger and other topics—have also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation and TANK.

Book preview

The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

A Note About the Author

Copyright Page

Thank you for buying this

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on the author, click here.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For my mother, Chitra

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

Preface

Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition. It asks: what would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women? It answers: we do not know; let us try and see.

---

Feminism begins with a woman’s recognition that she is a member of a sex class: that is, a member of a class of people assigned to an inferior social status on the basis of something called sex— a thing that is said to be natural, pre-political, an objective material ground on which the world of human culture is built.

We inspect this supposedly natural thing, sex, only to find that it is already laden with meaning. At birth, bodies are sorted as male or female, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.¹

There is another sense of the word sex: sex as a thing we do with our sexed bodies. Some bodies are for other bodies to have sex with. Some bodies are for the pleasure, the possession, the consumption, the worshipping, the servicing, the validating of other bodies. Sex in this second sense is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics. Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests. Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.

A famous philosopher once said to me that he objected to feminist critiques of sex because it was only during sex that he felt truly outside politics, that he felt truly free. I asked him what his wife would say to that. (I couldn’t ask her myself; she hadn’t been invited to the dinner.) This is not to say that sex cannot be free. Feminists have long dreamed of sexual freedom. What they refuse to accept is its simulacrum: sex that is said to be free, not because it is equal, but because it is ubiquitous. In this world, sexual freedom is not a given but something to be achieved, and it is always incomplete. Simone de Beauvoir, dreaming of a freer sex to come, wrote in The Second Sex:

assuredly, women’s autonomy, even if it spares men a good number of problems, will also deny them many conveniences; assuredly, there are certain ways of living the sexual adventure that will be lost in the world of tomorrow: but this does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, and dreams will be banished from it. Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future … new carnal and affective relations of which we cannot conceive will be born between the sexes … It is absurd to contend that … vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers; the contradictions opposing flesh to spirit, instant to time, the vertigo of immanence to the appeal of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of oblivion will never disappear; tension, suffering, joy, and the failure and triumph of existence will always be materialized in sexuality … on the contrary, it is when the slavery of half of humanity is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the … human couple will discover its true form.²

What would it take for sex really to be free? We do not yet know; let us try and see.

---

These essays are about the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by a hope of a different world. They reach back to an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon, as something squarely within the bounds of social critique. The women in this tradition—from Simone de Beauvoir and Alexandra Kollontai to bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, and Adrienne Rich—dare us to think about the ethics of sex beyond the narrow parameters of consent. They compel us to ask what forces lie behind a woman’s yes; what it reveals about sex that it is something to which consent must be given; how it is that we have come to put so much psychic, cultural, and legal weight on a notion of consent that cannot support it. And they ask us to join them in dreaming of a freer sex.

At the same time, these essays seek to remake the political critique of sex for the twenty-first century: to take seriously the complex relationship of sex to race, class, disability, nationality, and caste; to think about what sex has become in the age of the internet; to ask what it means to invoke the power of the capitalist and carceral state to address the problems of sex.

These essays respond largely to situations in the US and the UK; I also pay some attention to India. This is partly a reflection of my own background. But it is also a deliberate choice. These essays are critical of much mainstream anglophone feminist thought and practice, which for decades has been the most visible, and materially powerful, form of feminism around the world. (Of course the feminists working outside of the anglophone mainstream have never been invisible, or marginal, to themselves or their communities.) It is good to be able to write that this dominance has, of late, been receding, not least because the most exhilarating recent expressions of feminist energies have come from outside Anglophone contexts. To take just a few examples at the time of writing: in Poland, where the right-wing coalition government is implementing further legal restrictions on abortion, feminists have led a general uprising across the country, with protests in more than 500 cities and towns; in Argentina, five years of mass marches by feminists under the slogan Ni una Menos (Not one woman less) have compelled the Congress to legalize abortion, while feminists in Brazil, Chile and Colombia, where abortion remains largely illegal, are organizing to follow suit; in Sudan, women led the revolutionary protests that brought down the dictatorial regime of Omar al-Bashir, and it was a young Sudanese feminist in her early twenties, Alaa Salah, who demanded that the United Nations Security Council ensure that women, resistance groups, and religious minorities be included on equal terms in Sudan’s transitional government.³

On some matters—sex workers’ rights, the destructiveness of carceral politics, the pathologies of contemporary sexuality—these essays are adamant. But on others they are ambivalent, unwilling to reduce what is dense and difficult to something easier. Feminism must be relentlessly truth-telling, not least about itself. (As the labor historian David Roediger writes, a radical movement speaking frankly to itself is a far more important activity than ‘speaking truth to power.’⁴) Feminism cannot indulge the fantasy that interests always converge; that our plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences; that politics is a place of comfort.

The feminist scholar and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, speaking in the last century about this one, warned that a truly radical politics—that is, a coalitional politics—cannot be a home to its members:

Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets … And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition.⁵

For Reagon, it is the belief that politics should be a perfect home—a place of complete belonging, a womb, as she puts it—which leads to the exclusionary contradictions of much feminism. Feminism envisaged as a home insists on commonality before the fact, pushing aside all those who would trouble its domestic idyll. A truly inclusionary politics is an uncomfortable, unsafe politics.

In these essays I attempt to dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence. These essays do not offer a home. But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition. I have written them to be read together, or by themselves. They are not intended to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did. Instead, they represent my attempt to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. This has always been the way of feminism: women working collectively to articulate the unsaid, the formerly unsayable. At its best, feminist theory is grounded in what women think when they are by themselves, what they say to each other on the picket line and on the assembly line and on the street corner and in the bedroom, what they have tried to say to their husbands and fathers and sons and bosses and elected officials a thousand times over. At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do.

Oxford, 2020

The Conspiracy Against Men

I know two men who were, I am fairly confident, falsely accused of rape. One of them was a wealthy young man accused by a desperate young woman who had stolen some credit cards and was on the run. The rape accusation was just one part of a larger fraud. The man wasn’t where she said he had been when the alleged rape took place, there was no evidence of rape beyond her testimony, and much else of what she said turned out to be false. He was never arrested or charged, and from the start the police assured him that all would be well.

The other man is a creep: narcissistic, charming, manipulative, and a liar. He is known to use all sorts of coercive methods to get sex, but not the sort that fall under the legal definition of rape. The women he has sex with (young, precocious, confident) are consenting; indeed, he’s the kind of man who makes women feel, at the time, that they are the ones seducing him—that they are the ones with all the agency and power, when in fact they have relatively little of it. ("She seduced me" is of course a defense commonly made by rapists—and by pedophiles.) When one of these women, years later—having learned of the man’s pattern, and seeing him for what he was—accused him of assault, it seemed to those who knew him that she might well have been seeking a legal remedy for what he put her through: for having been used, manipulated, and lied to. Maybe, on top of all that, he really did assault her. But the evidence suggested otherwise. He was never charged with rape, though he was, because of his reckless, unprofessional behavior, made to resign from his job. From what I hear, the man (now gainfully re-employed) goes on much as he did before, though more carefully and quietly, and with more plausible deniability. These days he self-styles as a feminist.

---

I know many more than two women who have been raped. This is unsurprising. Many more women are raped than falsely accuse men of rape. With just one exception, none of the women I know pressed criminal charges or made a report to the police. One friend, when we were both in college, called me to tell me that a guy she knew, a friend of a friend, had, during an early evening group outing when they were fooling around on a pool table in an empty dorm social room, forced himself inside her. She had said no, resisted, finally pushed him off. The evening resumed. Neither she nor I considered going to the police. The purpose of the call was simply to acknowledge that this thing—we didn’t call it rape—had happened.

---

Some men are falsely accused of rape; there is nothing to be gained by denying it. But false accusations are rare. The most detailed ever study of sexual assault reports, released by the UK Home Office in 2005, estimated that just 3 percent of 2,643 rape reports made over the course of fifteen years were probably or possibly false.¹ Yet the British police had classified, in the same period, more than twice as many—8 percent—of these reports as false, based on its officers’ personal judgment.² In 1996, the FBI also reported an 8 percent rate of unfounded or false forcible rape complaints, aggregated from police departments across the US.³ In both Britain and the US, the 8 percent figure was largely the result of police officers’ susceptibility to rape myths; in both countries, police officers were inclined to consider a report false if there hadn’t been a physical struggle, if no weapon had been involved, or if the accuser had had a prior relationship with the accused.⁴ In 2014, according to figures published in India, 53 percent of rape reports in Delhi from the previous year had been false, a statistic giddily seized on by Indian men’s rights activists. But the definition of false reports had been extended to cover all those cases that hadn’t reached court, never mind those that didn’t meet the legal standard for rape in India⁵—including marital rape, which 6 percent of married Indian women report having experienced.⁶

In the UK Home Office study, the police judged 216 of 2,643 complaints false. In those 216 cases, the complainants had named a total of thirty-nine suspects; six of these suspects were arrested, and charges were brought against two of them; in both cases, the charges were eventually dropped. So, in the final analysis, bearing in mind that the Home Office counted only a third as many false accusations as the police, just 0.23 percent of rape reports led to a false arrest, and only 0.07 percent of rape reports led to a man being falsely charged with rape; none resulted in wrongful conviction.⁷

I am not saying that false rape accusations are something to shrug at. They are not. An innocent man disbelieved, mistrusted, his reality twisted, his reputation stripped, his life potentially ruined by the manipulation of state power: this is a moral scandal. And, notice, it is a moral scandal that has much in common with the experience of rape victims, who in many cases face a conspiracy of disbelief, especially from police. Nonetheless, a false rape accusation, like a plane crash, is an objectively unusual event that occupies an outsized place in the public imagination. Why then does it carry its cultural charge? The answer cannot simply be that its victims are men: the number of men raped—largely by other men—easily overwhelms the number of men falsely accused of rape.⁸ Could it be not only that the victims of false rape accusations are usually men, but also that its assumed perpetrators are women?

Except that, very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of raping women. This is a thing almost universally misunderstood about false rape accusations. When we think of a false rape accusation we picture a scorned or greedy woman, lying to the authorities. But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. In the US, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate, 147 men were exonerated for sexual assault on the basis of false accusations or perjury between 1989 and 2020.⁹ (In that same period, 755 people—five times as many—were found to have been falsely accused, and wrongly convicted, of murder.¹⁰) Fewer than half of these men were deliberately framed by their alleged victims. Meanwhile, over half of their cases involved official misconduct: a category that applies when the police coach false victim or witness identifications, charge a suspect despite the victim’s failure to identify him as the attacker, suppress evidence or induce false confessions.

---

There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men. Of the 147 men who were exonerated of sexual assault on the basis of a false accusation or perjury in the US between 1989 and 2020, 85 were non-white and 62 white. Of those 85 non-white men, 76 were black, which means that black men make up 52 percent of those convicted of rape on the basis of false accusations or perjury. Yet black men make up only about 14 percent of the US male population, and 27 percent of men convicted of rape.¹¹ A black man serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man convicted of sexual assault.¹² He is also very likely to be poor— not just because black people in the US are disproportionately poor, but because most incarcerated Americans, of all races, are poor.¹³

The National Registry of Exonerations, which lists the men and women wrongly imprisoned in the US since 1989, does not detail the long history of false rape accusations against black men which bypassed the legal system altogether. In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.¹⁴ It does not take into account the 150 black men who were lynched between 1892 and 1894 for alleged rape or attempted rape of white women—a charge that included known consensual affairs between black men and white women—as chronicled in Wells’s remarkable A Red Record.¹⁵ It does not mention the case of William Brooks of Galesline, Arkansas, who was lynched on May 23, 1894, for asking a white woman to marry him, or tell us anything about the unknown Negro whom Wells reports having been lynched in West Texas earlier that month for the crime of writing letter to white woman. In 2007, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had lied, fifty-two years earlier, when she said that a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till had grabbed and sexually propositioned her—a lie that spurred Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his brother to abduct, bludgeon, shoot, and kill Till.¹⁶ Roy Bryant and his brother were acquitted of murder, despite the overwhelming evidence against them; four months later, they were paid $3,000 for the story of how they did it by Look magazine. There is no registry that details the uses of false rape accusations as a tactic of colonial rule: in India, in Australia, in South Africa, in Palestine.¹⁷

It might seem surprising, then, that false rape accusations are, today, a predominantly wealthy white male preoccupation. But it isn’t surprising—not really. The anxiety about false rape accusations is purportedly about injustice (innocent people being harmed), but actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor black and brown men. For poor men, and women, of color, the white woman’s false rape accusation is just one element in a matrix of vulnerability to state power.¹⁸ But false rape accusations are a unique instance of middle-class and wealthy white men’s vulnerability to the injustices routinely perpetrated by the carceral state against poor people of color. Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighborhood where they don’t belong, will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.¹⁹

That representation is, of course, false: even in the case of rape, the state is on the side of wealthy white men. But what matters— in the sense of what is ideologically efficacious—is not the reality, but the misrepresentation. In the false rape accusation, wealthy white men misperceive their vulnerability to women and to the state.

---

In 2016, the Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced a twenty-year-old Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, to six months in county jail (of which he served three) on three felony counts of sexual assault against Chanel Miller. In a letter to the judge, Brock Turner’s father, Dan A. Turner, wrote:

Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan 17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easygoing personality and welcoming smile … You can see this in his face, the way he walks, his weakened voice, his lack of appetite. Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself. I was always excited to buy him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. I had to make sure to hide some of my favorite pretzels or chips because I knew they wouldn’t be around long after Brock walked in from a long swim practice. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.²⁰

The myopic focus on his son’s well-being—wasn’t Miller’s life also deeply altered forever?—is striking. Even more so is the (presumably inadvertent) sexual pun: 20 minutes of action—healthy, adolescent fun. Should Brock, Dan Turner seems to want to ask, be punished for that? Then there is the food. Brock no longer loves his steak? You no longer have to hide the pretzels or chips from Brock? This is the way one talks about a golden retriever, not an adult human. But in a sense Dan Turner is talking about an animal, a perfectly bred specimen of wealthy white American boyhood: happy go lucky, easygoing, sporty, friendly, and endowed with a healthy appetite and glistening coat. And, like an animal, Brock is imagined to exist outside the moral order. These red-blooded, white-skinned, all-American boys—and the all-American girls who date them and marry them (but are never, ever sexually assaulted by them)—are good kids, the best kids, our kids.

---

That Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was one such all-American kid was his ultimate defense against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that he had sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school. Ford, Kavanaugh said, did not travel in the same social circles as he and his friends.²¹ In the summer of 1982, Brett—only child of Martha and Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr.—was spending time with his friends from Georgetown Prep, among the US’s most expensive private schools (and alma mater of Neil Gorsuch and two of Robert Kennedy’s sons), together with students of the neighboring Catholic girls’ schools: Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross. The group—Tobin, Mark, P.J., Squi, Bernie, Matt, Becky, Denise, Lori, Jenny, Pat, Amy, Julie, Kristin, Karen, Suzanne, Maura, Megan, Nicki—spent that summer going to the beach, training for football, lifting weights, drinking beers, attending church on Sundays, and generally having the best time of their lives. Sixty-five women who knew Kavanaugh in high school signed a letter defending him after Ford’s allegation was made public. Friends for a lifetime, Kavanaugh said of these women,

Reviews for The Right to Sex

[cecilturtle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this series of five essays which holds feminism accountable for its failures and vagaries. Using specific examples, Srinivasan is able to show the ways in which intersectionality affects individuals. Among the themes that particularly held my attention: the way in which black men were overly negatively impacted by policies; the way economically disadvantaged and women of colour were left behind; the tension between personal preferences and political expression.It's not all finger pointing: the author gives credit where it is due and builds on the theories tested through the decades, while showing opportunities for new leadership.Original and thought-provoking

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ugh, this book is a perfect example of why I don't like philosophy.There's on the one hand, then on the other hand, then on a further hand. How do you help sex workers? Everything you try ends up harming the poor, women of color, or immigrants. Everything you try about everything ends up harming poor women, women of color and immigrants. The ulitimate solution is abolition - the abolition of policing and jails. In its place, we substitute guaranteed health care, housing, nutrition, and a liveable wage. Then in this utopia, there will be no need for crime. Then if you inhabit that utopia with robots, you'd be right. There would be no crime. Humans, on the other hand, just aren't that perfectable.

[ronna · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Book only contains up to the table of contents. I want access to the whole book.how do I get that?

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating, challenging work of feminist philosophy. On intersectionality: a movement “that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.” In her discussion of sex under patriarchy, she posits that law might just be the wrong tool to deal with many kinds of bad sex produced under patriarchy (e.g., sex that men get women to affirmatively consent to but that they don’t actually want).She discusses her students’ openness to earlier feminist critiques of pornography, since they grew up with the awful misogynistic stuff readily available. “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” But law is not a good tool for dealing with the consequences; the UK prohibits porn from featuring spanking, watersports, ageplay, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, facesitting, and fisting as well as several other things, including “penetration by any object ‘associated with violence.’” As she asks: “Does a man’s penis count? Presumably not.” The UK prohibits depicting female ejaculation, “an act that is emblematic of women’s pleasure,” as well as things like facesitting associated with femdom porn, but leaves unregulated basic male-focused porn. “But the whole point of the feminist critiques of porn was to disrupt the logic of the mainstream: to suggest that what turns most people on is not thereby OK.” Her students don’t want further legal regulation of porn, but not because they were free speech absolutists; rather they recognized that laws would be used against the marginalized (what she calls a “sex positivity of fear,” motivated by fear of authoritarian alternatives). Relatedly, she asks, “is the fact that there is relatively little porn fetishising Native American, Aboriginal or Dalit women evidence that they are not oppressed? … Anti-porn feminists are too confident in their assumption that images of sexual and racial domination on screen can do nothing but exacerbate sexual and racial domination off the screen.”She also discusses the extent to which it is possible to critique individual sexual desires without suppressing sexual minorities—“no fats no fems no Asians” is individual, but also political and cultural. There are no easy answers in her discussion; when she talks about Asian women who prefer to date non-Asian men, she notes, “[s]ometimes when we say that Asian men remind us of our cousins, we are saying: we know too much about how these boys and men are raised.”There’s also an interesting essay about prohibitions on student-teacher sex as implementing not primarily feminist principles but pedagogical ones: If the very real erotics of education are diverted to physical sex, then students—primarily women—lose important educational opportunities. The proper object of students’ erotic energies is not the professor, but what he represents: “knowledge, truth, understanding.” Students want to have the professor’s capacity to understand, “not just the pleasure of watching him exercise that capacity,” or maybe they aren’t sure whether they want to be like him or have him; in that case, it’s very easy for the teacher to steer inchoate desire in the anti-pedagogical direction, especially given “the way that women are socialised to interpret their feelings about men they admire.” Not having sex with students isn’t the same thing as treating them like children.There’s also a great essay about anti-prostitution campaigns. She’s against abolitionism because she’s most interested in improving conditions for women. Criminalization leads to unchecked violence against sex workers by johns and the police; legalization/regulation benefits men but still excludes women from being primary beneficiaries and leaves a subset of sex workers who can’t meet the legal requirements criminalized. And making buying but not selling sex illegal leads johns to demand greater privacy and thus impose greater risks. Thus, none of these regimes make sex workers, as a class, better off. She argues that abolitionists want to punish men who buy sex “as individuals, but also as stand-ins for all violent men,” and that this isn’t worth making life worse for sex workers. Abolitionists conceive of this as a necessary step, but she doesn’t believe that criminalization of any kind genuinely gets us closer to a world without sex work, any more than banning abortion decreases abortions.Feminist policymaking has many of these wicked problems: mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence “reduced the amount of violence perpetrated by employed white men while increasing the amount of violence perpetrated by unemployed black men,” but poor abused women are not given the option of having the state provide employment to their male partners, only of having them locked up. She’s generally anti-punishment because “once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.” I’m personally skeptical that it’s truly impossible to make distinctions, but I take the point that feminists should be realists about who’s going to jail. More generally, she argues, there “is no settling in advance on a political programme that is immune to co-option …. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move.”